Tag: ssl

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Weekly Wrap 246: Tired, hollow, but oh so productive

Log: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 16 to Sunday 22 February 2015 has been busy, productive and exhausting. And it’s still going. If only my life lately were about more than just trying to be busy and productive. Sigh.

Podcasts

  • “The 9pm Malcolm and the Cnuts”, being The 9pm Edict episode 37. I hadn’t planned to do an episode of the Edict this week, but on Friday I had an encounter with Malcolm Turnbull, and one thing led to another… But I am getting more efficient. This episode only took six hours to produce, although it did omit a couple of regular segments.
  • Corrupted Nerds Extra: Malcolm Turnbull opens NICTA Techfest 2015, being the full audio of Turnbull’s speech and subsequent doorstop press conference.

Articles

5at5

There were four editions of 5at5 this week, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and an off-schedule 7at7 on Sunday morning. You might want to subscribe so you receive them all as they’re released. Subscribe. Just subscribe.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Friday, I went to NICTA’s Techfest at Australian Technology Park, where I was fed and watered.
  • Sunday is the first day of the Tech Leaders Forum, formerly known as Kickstart, at the Fairmont Resort. The event continues on Monday, so I’ll post the full list of largesse next week.

The Week Ahead

Monday is the second and final day of the Tech Leaders Forum, after which I shall collapse and have an early night.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m writing a feature for ZDNet Australia.

On Thursday, I’m heading to Sydney for the next step in my treatment program for sleep apnoea — which I have yet to blog about in any detail — as well as some errands and then, at 1615 AEDT, a television spot on ABC News24.

On Friday, I’ll probably be writing my usual column for ZDNet Australia.

Saturday is unplanned. Place your bids now.

On Sunday, I’ll be producing an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast. Because I am an idiot.

[Photo: Log. Termites had eaten out the core of this tree at Bunjaree Cottages, and it had filled with water — much to the surprise of the chain-saw wielding chap who felled it. A shame I wasn’t there to see it. Photographed on 20 February 2015.]

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“Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches

Stripe logoNow that I’ve run two successful crowdfunding campaigns through Pozible, I’m starting to set up systems to accept direct payments for my various projects. The first, a page to accept one-off donations was mostly straightforward.

I chose to use Stripe as the card payment service because I already had a Stripe account for my second Pozible project, The 9pm Resurrection.

While Stripe is still in beta in Australia, Pozible already uses it to handle recurring subscription payments, and I’d already received an invitation into the beta program. I figured it made sense to keep all my payments in one place.

Plus I’ll eventually be using Memberful to process subscriptions, and that also uses Stripe.

To integrate Stripe into this WordPress site, I used the free plugin WP Stripe from Human Made Limited. This provided me with one payment form per website, which is all I needed for this task. I also installed the WP Stripe Email Receipts plugin by Philip Newcomer.

All that went smoothly. I installed the plugins, activated them, entered my Stripe account keys and a template for the email receipts — and they just worked.

The only difficulties came with configuring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the web server, and that was down to a bug I encountered in the WHM/cPanel hosting management software while I was installing the SSL certificate. That’s nothing to do with Stripe or WordPress or the plugins, of course, just my dodgy web server.

I’ll document that bug over the fold. Meanwhile, why not try out the system and give me a tip? Was that too blatant?

Continue reading ““Tip Stilgherrian” page operational, with few glitches”

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Weekly Wrap 43

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week I’m slowly getting back to the normal level of media work, it seems.

I’ve even completely finished the coming week’s edition of the Patch Monday podcast and sent it to ZDNet Australia. I feel so… productive!

Podcasts

Articles

  • Iranian hackers prove internet security is rubbish, for Crikey, explaining the implications of the presumed-Iranian hackers managing to issue themselves fake SSL certificates.
  • Electronic voting a threat to democracy, for ABC Unleashed. This opinion piece essentially says that the security risks outweigh the convenience. I was most amused to see commenters claim that I’m therefore “afraid of technology” because I don’t understand it. Convenience is everything, apparently.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • Shiva Kumar from PR firm Edelman bought me a cup of coffee on Monday when he briefed me on using LinkedIn. LinkedIn themselves then provided me with a free Pro-level account.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view from Wattle Cottage, which is where I’m living this weekend. Of course it’s one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, where I’ve been based since early February. This is the first time I’ve stayed in this particular cottage and the view brings with it a vast number of birds.]

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Links for 11 June 2009 through 13 June 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 11 June 2009 through 13 June 2009, gathered with tenderness and love. Especially love.

  • The Poll Cruncher | Pollytics: How trustworthy is the result of an opinion poll? This handy little tool allows you to enter the sample size and the result, and it gives you the margin of error. Assuming, of course, that the poll was conducted randomly and ethically in the first place.
  • What’s Your Professional Reputation? | Pollytics: Possum interprets the latest results from the Roy Morgan poll of public perceptions of ethics and honesty for various professions. As usual, newspaper journalists and car salesmen are down the bottom. Possum creates a nice little interactive graph showing how the result have changed each year since 1979.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four turns sixty | Inside Story: Brian McFarlane’s take on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s classic. Somehow, while talking about film adaptations and connections to Phillip K Dick, he completely fails to mention Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
  • Dear Global Service Direct, where is my Snuggie? | Crikey: Crikey‘s coverage of their interactions with the Snuggie has the potential to become quite obsessive. In a good way. However this silly exchange of emails with Snuggie’s sellers contain one of the best customer service responses ever: “I wish I could do more but I am just a pawn.” Also, a graph.
  • From little things… | RN Future Tense: This episode of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense included an interview with ActionAid Australia’s Archie Law about Project TOTO, as well as some great stuff about innovative uses of telecommunications technology in Kenya and India. Internet via bus, anyone?
  • William Langewiesche on Somali pirates | vanityfair.com: Feature article on the incident where French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was targeted by Somali pirates.
  • louder than swahili: The blog of Pernille, a 37yo Scandinavian woman who’s been living in Tanzania since 2007, and most recently before that spent 26 months among Sudanese refugees along and across the Ugandan border to Southern Sudan.
  • A Never Ending Race | absolutelybangkok.com: Bangkok in 2015 is a paranoid short yarn from Yan Monchatre, a French cartoonist and illustrator who’s resident in Bangkok.
  • The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection | Moserware: A deep, deep explanation of what happens when your web browser creates an encrypted connection to a website.
  • mHITs: An Australian company providing the technology to pay by mobile phone. Currently seems to be limited to food and drink, and to a handful of venues in Canberra and Sydney.
  • The United Republic Consulate of Tanzania Consulate: This is, I hope, the official website of the Consulate for Tanzania in Melbourne. It’s not particularly reassuring when the home page’s title bar reads: “::Welcom to Company Name::”.
  • Rise of online mercenaries | Australian IT: Steven Bellovin, professor of computing science at Columbia University, predicts the rise of online mercenaries using techniques going back 200 years to letters of marque and reprisal, where governments commission somebody to attack another government’s assets with perfect immunity under law. The story’s a couple weeks old but still relevant.
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Links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008, thinned with cheap turpentine:

  • NSW Government in Exile: “NSW is mired in incompetence and corruption. No-one in or near power appears able to come up with a coherent policy or plan. So let’s start.” Aparently I’m minister for infrasructure.
  • HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter | Mashable: “The strength of your community determines overall what you will (or won’t) get out of the microblogging platform. What do you want to use Twitter for?” Sarah Evans offers some good tips.
  • HOW NOT TO: Build Your Twitter Community | Mashable: The flipside to Sarah Evans’ previous post.
  • What the family values folks don't get about family | denialism blog: “The anti-gay marriage folks think that family is all about fear, sex, and violence… These folks who fought for Prop 8 don’t understand the real meaning of family, of love, of comfort. For most of us, it’s not about fulfilling one fringe group’s idea of what God wants. It’s about creating a life with another, sharing a physical and emotional space with someone, rejoicing together when things are good, and holding each other when things are tough. It’s human.”
  • Twitter is Real Life | Aide-mémoire: The ever-thoughtful Kate Carruthers has written an excellent piece countering the “Twitter is dead” meme which seems to surface from time to time. Yes, she says nice things about me (again), but there are good bits too.
  • 30 Hilarious TV Meltdowns, Outbursts & Blunders | ClearlyAV: A collection of 30 videos which are (mostly) people losing their temper on TV.
  • Green ICT Symposium 2008: The presentations for this conference, held in Canberra last Friday 14 November 2008, are now online.
  • SSL Certificate Tester | digicert: While I don’t use digicert to buy my SSL certificates, this handy test page is good for showing the status of SSL certificates installed on your web server.
  • Making money twice | 37signals: A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times).
  • NYT: Obama saying goodbye to BlackBerry? | msnbc.com: The limitations on the President, both legal and security-based, mean that Barack Obama may have to give up using email. Unable to get unfiltered access to The Real World, he’ll become increasingly dependent on a worldview filtered through his “advisors”.